So I was just looking at my Google Analytics report on the keywords that drive the most traffic to this site. It’s a tie for first place: “create free blog” and “create free blogs“. Looking back in my archives, I realize that I haven’t blogged about creating a blog since I wrote How do you start a blog site? in late July, when I first mentioned using either blogger or wordpress.

With millions of blogs (actually over a hundred million as of 2008), people are obviously finding ways to create their own blogs. Of course, many of these are created by the folks who have multiple blogs, usually across several niches, while others have abandoned their blogs long ago after only a post or two. There are also a good number of bloggers who simply find a release in simply blogging about a topic they love. They don’t do it because their employers put it in their job descriptions or they’re making a living from it. Rather, they just want to have a voice.

For a good number of these folks, they don’t need their own domain name (although it would be nice and it’s relatively inexpensive), don’t need to pay for hosting, and don’t want to do any coding or advertising. They want to start typing! The quickest way to do just that is to go to one of the sources as I mentioned before, blogger.com or wordpress.com, since they have the best free offerings. Although my companies have used others before, when I started my first personal blogs years ago, I used blogger.com (or blogspot.com, same thing). Although I’m tech savvy, I, too, wanted to just start typing. Blogger provided me with intuitive tools to do just that. Seriously, it can’t really get any easier. For instance, here’s how you could do it:

  1. Go to blogger.com and create an account if you don’t already have one.
  2. From your blogger dashboard, click Create a Blog.
  3. Enter a blog title and a blog address (it will look like createablog.blogger.com).
  4. Choose a template. This can be changed later.
  5. Click New Post and start typing!

Moving forward, you can use your blogger dashboard for a variety of other things, like adding gadgets, changing fonts and colors, monitoring comments, and much more. You can even earn an income by adding Google AdSense to your blog (yes, you really can and I know because I’ve done it). WordPress.com is similar in almost every way but I chose to keep all of my early blogs in one spot, which was much easier to manage. I did eventually bring some serious blogs over to wordpress.org, which is a more advanced step for those who want it. If you’re looking for a quick write up on the differences between the two, just look at my WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org post from last month. I also documented the move for this blog on these posts: From Blogger to WordPress and From Blogger to WordPress, part II.

The bottom line is, you can’t really go wrong with either choice. Remember, the most important thing is getting started. The time it took you to read this, you could’ve already been typing your own post from scratch!

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